Value judgments in textbooks: The coefficient of evaluation as a quantitative measure

Treatment of minority groups in textbooks has traditionally been studied by subjective means. This factor has rendered the research, despite its volume, essentially noncumulative. Evaluative Coefficient (ECO) Analysis was designed to provide a valid quantitative index of the evaluative treatment of a subject by a communication source. Use of the instrument in an analysis of evaluative treatment of four minority groups in history textbooks used in Ontario schools revealed significant differences among evaluations accorded to the different minorities, and between different classes of textbooks. The ability of ECO Analysis to produce a quantitative measure of evaluation, along with its relative simplicity, suggests its potential for further comparative analysis of textbooks and of other communications content.

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Résumé Le traitement des groupes de minorité a traditionnellement été étudié par des moyens subjectifs. D'où les recherches en ce domaine, malgré leur volume, sont essentiellement noncumulatives.Evaluative Coefficient (ECO) Analysis a été conçu afin de fournir un indice valide quantitatif du traitement évaluatif d'un sujet par une source de communication. L'emploi de cet instrument pour analyser le traitement évaluatif de quatres groupes de minorité dans les textes d'histoire employés par les écoles de l'Ontario a révélé des différences significatives parmi les évaluations accordées aux différentes minorités, et parmi les différents groupes de textes scolaires. La capacité de l'ECO à produire une mesure quantitative d'évaluation, et sa relative simplicité, suggère son potentiel pour d'autres analyses comparatives de textes et contenus de communication.

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Queen's University     

Nationalistic education as the focus for civics and citizenship education : The case of Hong Kong

Civic education has been assigned the mission of preparing critical thinking, responsible, participating, multidimensional citizens and is also used to serve the function of instilling a sense of national identity, loyalty to the nation state and patriotism In 1996, before the return of sovereignty of Hong Kong to China, the Hong Kong Education Department published theGuidelines in Civic Education for School (1996), which includes education for democracy, human rights education, global education and nationalistic education This survey adopted an amalgamate framework of five types of nationalistic education to study the understanding of nationalistic education of civic educators in secondary schools in Hong Kong The initial findings showed that the civic educators were basically strongly eclectic in terms of education for cosmopolitan, civic, and cultural nationalism and moderately eclectic in terms of anti colonial nationalism but rejected education for totalitarian nationalism This eclectic understanding can be said to be heading towards a more liberal, rational, open and inclusive type of nationalistic education, which is compatible with a cosmopolitan and pluralistic society such as Hong Kong     

Young Children Understand That Looking Leads to Knowing (So Long as They Are Looking into a Single Barrel)

3 experiments were conducted to investigate the claim made by Wimmer, Hogrefe, and Perner that 3-4-year-old children do not understand that people gain knowledge about something by looking at it. The first experiment involved a simple forced-choice procedure in which children had to judge which of 2 assistants knew what was inside a box when one of the assistants had looked inside and the other had lifted it up. In this experiment, the children did realize that the assistant who had looked in the box knew its contents. The second experiment followed the Wimmer et al. procedure, but with a simpler question form. The children were just asked to state whether someone knew what was in the box. Again, the children were able to work out that a person who had looked in a box knew what was inside it. In the third experiment, a direct comparison was made between the simpler question and the more complex, double-barreled question asked by Wimmer et al. The children found the more complex question considerably harder. The results of these experiments suggest that, in contrast to the claims made by Wimmer et al., 3- and 4-year-old children do understand that looking leads to knowing, and that their difficulty in the Wimmer et al. study was mainly with the form of the question that they were asked.     

The generation effect in reading and proofreading

Using a naturalistic text generation and proofreading task, we investigated two questions concerning the effect of text familiarity on proofreading performance. Can experimental evidence be provided for the intuition that it is harder to proofread one's own writing than someone else's? Will the effect of text familiarity on proofreading differ as a function of whether the familiarity is self-generated or experimentally-induced? Subjects spent 30 minutes composing an essay on student life; after a 20 minute interval (Experiment 1) or a two week interval (Experiment 2) they proofread their own essay, another subject's essay after being familiarized on an error-free version of it, or another subject's essay without the benefit of a preview. Experiment 1 showed that subjects wereless able to detect errors (e.g.,The best part of student like is socializing.) in self-generated essays than in unfamiliar other-generated essays; on the other hand, they werebetter able to detect errors in familiar other-generated essays that in unfamiliar ones. Experiment 2 showed that the disadvantage for proofreading self-generated text is likely a by-product of extreme familiarity rather than any special quality of self-generated knowledgeper se. The results have implications for models of skilled reading.     

Community of practice versus community of readers: the literacy tutors’ dilemma

This paper describes a journey undertaken by literacy tutors who were caught between incompatible values and needs in building apprentices’ literacy. The highly literate tutors were committed to teaching critical literacy. They believed that improved literacy could support learners’ aspirations to advance their prospects at work, build their connections within their community and improve their health. Hence, the tutors aimed to guide their learners into membership of an imagined community of fluent readers. They found, however, that the apprentices, along with their managers and training coordinators, saw literacy as instrumental rather than a desired outcome in its own right. Essentially, achieving a sufficient level of literacy was needed for the apprentices to become members of workplace communities of practice. Tutors then questioned their prior assumptions about the intrinsic importance of literacy, slowly accepting a dichotomous way of thinking where industrial ways of learning and knowing were predominant. Tutors’ realisation that apprentices already possessed embodied and oral literacies helped them to support the apprentices in escaping (though not leaving) workplace contexts that were becoming increasingly document-driven in character and featuring rising expectations of improved print literacy.     

Beattie,Nicholas. 2002. The Freinet Movements of France,Italy, and Germany, 1920–2000. NY: Edwin Mellen Press,Oxford: Symposium Books. 418 pp. ISBN 0-7734-7020-4.

International Review of Education -     

Professional Conversations and Professional Growth

A professional development program for 18 teachers was conducted over a two-year period. The participating teachers taught in intermediate schools (students aged 11–13) and secondary schools. The teachers worked collaboratively to improve their mathematics teaching, with encouragement to reflect on their practice but with minimal instruction from the researchers. Results, as defined by change in teaching practices, beliefs, and reflections, and student achievement, indicated that the collaborative program was particularly useful for experienced secondary school teachers but less useful for intermediate school teachers. We concluded that this type of professional development was most useful for teachers who had sufficient knowledge of mathematics; these teachers were able to focus on pedagogy and to draw connections between aspects of the mathematics they taught, without recourse to a specialist's advice. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Inhibitory Control as a Contributor to Conscience in Childhood: From Toddler to Early School Age

In this article we report a longitudinal extension of previous findings about the critical role of temperamental inhibitory or effortful control as the contributor to developing conscience in young children. A comprehensive observational battery, highly internally consistent, was developed to measure inhibitory control in 83 children at early school age who had been followed since toddlerhood and had been assessed using similar batteries at toddler and preschool age. We again confirmed the findings of robust longitudinal stability of inhibitory or effortful control, now from toddler to early school age, the increase with age, and gender differences, with girls outperforming boys. We also reaffirmed strong links, both contemporaneous and in the longitudinal sense, between in hibitory control and multiple, diverse measures of children's conscience at early school age, including observations of moral conduct, moral cognition, and moral self. The findings are discussed in view of the increasingly appreciated importance of temperament for critical aspects of socialization.     

And Robins I have Never Seen...

A group of children aged 9 and 10 were asked what signified Christmas to them. The children had all English as a mother tongue and were in the traditional mainstream English culture pattern. The children were asked: (1) to write random ideas on Christmas; (2) to define certain terms used in the nativity story, otherwise seldom used; (3) to identify unmarked greetings cards, isolating if possible reasons for their identification.

Afterwards, they heard a reminiscence of Christmas in another land, and applied their imagination to drawing cards appropriate to that.

The whole exercise was in the context of trying to give explicit reasons for signs which have implicit basic cultural significance, and the authors raise the question of whether at least partial knowledge of reasons is important in this type of semiological context, and whether making intuitive knowledge explicit could make a difference to learning.